I'm most thankful for ...

Thanksgiving is a good time to count blessings

America's Thanksgiving holiday is part of the practically universal human custom of holding harvest festivals.

Such festivals are reflections of a fundamentally religious impulse, in the sense that they are products of a desire to give thanks for things that, from a materialist point of view, are nothing more than the mechanistic outcomes of random chance.

After all, in a disenchanted, purely naturalistic world, there is in the strict sense nothing to give thanks for, both because everything could not be any different than the way it is, and how it isn't a product of any plan, but of the blind working of mindless processes.

But from a — in the broadest sense — spiritual perspective, things like the seasons and their bounty take on a whole different meaning: a meaning that makes the idea of giving thanks not merely intellectually coherent, but ethically and emotionally necessary.

It's one of the odd features of the human psyche that often people who have the most to give thanks for forget to do so, while people who have much less are more likely to appreciate what they do have.

In an effort to overcome that tendency, I'm going to acknowledge that I have far more to give thanks for than I usually realize.

With that in mind, here are just a few things and people I'd like to give thanks for as another year slips into its final weeks.

(This is a highly eclectic and far-from-compre-hensive list. Some column readers may consider it nothing more than a collection of random musings. Perhaps it is.)

— My family.

— The bleachers at Wrigley Field in Chicago on a hot summer afternoon. (And I'm not even a Cubs fan.)

— James Wright's poem "Lying in Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" (look it up).

— Some of my students at the University of Colorado Law School, for making it worth the effort to try to explore the nature of our very difficult subject matter (I'm not going to name any names — you know who you are).

— The University of Michigan football stadium on a fall afternoon, even when the team is terrible.

— The products of America's microbreweries, in particular Dale's Pale Ale of Lyons, Colo., and the many great products of Bell's Brewery in Kalamazoo, Mich.

— The Gettysburg Address.

— The American people, for having come far enough in overcoming the legacy of racism to elect an African-American president of the United States.

— The privilege of living in a largely free, immensely rich nation, with no war nearby.

— YouTube and the many other things on the Internet that have made so much information and conversation and art available to people all around the world.

— Speaking of the Internet, my co-authors at the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, for giving me a chance to try my hand at a different kind of writing for an audience their hard work had already created.

— The many tree-lined paths in the southwest corner of Central Park in New York City, near Columbus Circle.